Amazon Lex enables advanced conversational artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to allow self-service support in an organization’s contact center. With Amazon Lex, customers can interact through phone calls, websites, and messaging platforms. The bots integrated with Amazon Lex can answer frequently asked questions (FAQs), provide self-service experiences or screen customer requests before transferring them to a human agent.
Amazon Lex can be integrated perfectly with leading contact centers such as Amazon Connect, Genesys Cloud, and Amazon Chime SDK to facilitate a smooth and seamless omnichannel experience. One good example of Amazon Lex’s potential lies in its integration with the Talkdesk cloud contact center, a process inspired by the digital innovation journey of WaFd Bank. This post focuses on the chat channel, detailing how Amazon Lex and the Amazon Lex Web UI allow live agents to interact with customers effectively and efficiently without delay.
The operational sequence commences when a customer asks to be connected to an agent, the request gets processed, and a request is initiated to Talkdesk Digital Connect using the Start a Conversation API. The Talkdesk API returns a conversation ID to Amazon Lex if the request is successful. The Amazon Lex fulfillment Lambda function stores the conversation ID, making it accessible to the Amazon Lex Web UI. A communication session then opens between the agents and the customer through a WebSocket API in Amazon API Gateway.
The Lambda associated with the WebSocket API stores the conversation ID to WebSocket client ID mappings in Amazon DynamoDB. Via the Talkdesk Send a Message API, the Lambda function ships the customer’s message to the agent on Talkdesk contact center. The agent responds to the customer using a message sent through the callback Rest API, the conversation continues until an agent or a customer ends the conversation.
To implement the outlined solution, knowledge of certain AWS services such as Amazon API Gateway, Amazon CloudWatch, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM), AWS Lambda, Amazon Lex, Amazon Lex Web UI, AWS Secrets Manager and Talkdesk services is expected. Notably, Talkdesk Digital Connect API components for starting a conversation and sending a message are the most important components in implementing this solution.
To round off the implementation process, configuration of the Talkdesk chat with agent experience using the Talkdesk Digital Connect channel, the Talkdesk Amazon Lex CloudFormation template, and deployment of the Amazon Lex Web UI is needed. Testing should be done to verify the successful implementation of the Amazon Lex and Talkdesk chat interaction.
The post concludes by noting that Amazon Lex brings the power of conversational self-service to a customer’s preferred channels such as phone, web chat, and messaging applications. The solution is meant to be a quick implementation guide that can be adjusted to accommodate an organization’s specific needs.
